User:S730910/Texas Ranger Division

The 1919 "Canales" Investigation
On January 31, 1919, the Joint Committee of the Senate and the House convened at the state capitol in Austin, Texas, to begin an investigation of the Texas Rangers. The investigation was prompted by José Tomás Canales, a state representative from Brownsville, Texas. Canales filed nineteen charges against the Texas Rangers and declared a state of emergency as a result of the violent policing practices that Canales alleged were routinely used by the state force against Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals living along the U.S.-Mexico border. Canales also introduced a piece of legislation, House Bill 5, that proposed reorganizing the Texas Rangers and increasing the minimum qualifications and pay. Between January 31 and February 13 of 1919, the committee heard testimony from people across the state, including victims of state violence, witnesses or surviving relatives, and members of the Texas Rangers. The Texas State Library and Archives Commission has preserved the full transcript of the investigation, which consists of over 1600 pages of testimony and evidence.

This testimony revealed many issues within the Texas Rangers and highlighted several high-profile cases of abuse. For example, in January of 1918, a group consisting of Texas Rangers belonging to Company B and four local ranchers executed fifteen innocent Mexican men and boys in Porvenir, a small community in West Texas. In the aftermath, Texas Ranger Captain James Monroe Fox falsified official reports to Adjutant General James Harley, claiming that the Porvenir residents had fired on the group of Rangers. Fox would later amend his statements and ultimately resigned under pressure in 1918. However, other Texas Rangers involved in the massacre remained on the force. Another incident that came to light during the 1919 Investigation was the murder of Toribio Rodriguez, a Brownsville police officer, in December of 1912. Rodriguez encountered a group of Texas Rangers and county law enforcement traveling in a hack with no lights. After Rodriguez asked the men to light the lamps on the hack, they began shooting at him. He returned home with a minor wound. However, the group of men went to Rodriguez's house, shot him in the back, and took him to the jail. Rodriguez died a few days later on November 14, 1912. At the time of the investigation, at least one of the Rangers involved, Captain John J. Sanders, was still active on the force. These two particularly egregious cases offer a small sample of the many accounts of abuse that appear throughout the transcript. Witnesses also testified that violence by Texas Rangers extended beyond the U.S.-Mexico border region, and that other racial groups, and particularly African Americans, were subject to harassment and violence from these state agents.

On February 19, 1919, the committee presented its findings to the Texas House of Representatives. However, despite these revelations, the 1919 Investigation did not produce the sweeping changes in the organization's culture that policymakers like Canales had hoped for. Ultimately, no Texas Rangers were prosecuted for their involvement in acts of violence like the Porvenir Massacre or the murder of Toribio Rodriguez. While the committee acknowledged that “the conduct of certain members of the ranger force...is most reprehensible,” they justified the Rangers’ continuing presence along the border and praised the majority of the state agents for their “great service...in the protection of property.” However, there were a few notable changes. The state legislators decided to reduce the force from well over 1,000 men to just 68 Rangers. The majority of this reduction came from eliminating the "Loyalty Rangers," a group of unpaid, volunteer Rangers that was established during World War I to monitor acts of "disloyalty" in their communities. At the time of the investigation, there were approximately 800 Loyalty Rangers still in service. Many of the men who were dismissed moved into careers in local law enforcement, or later, in the U.S. Border Patrol, which was established in 1924.